FedEx essentially does make their own trucks - they buy from white box suppliers who have very narrow margins. Ships are similar. Planes probably have slightly higher margins, but they still will buy used.

Getting computers from the cloud companies is very different: most cloud products (aside from server rentals) are not in competitive markets.

False equivalence. FedEx isn't building the servers here, either. But they do have their own maintenance for their fleet. Thus the better analogy would be if FedEx outsourced fleet management & maintenance to Hertz or similar.

There is a huge difference between transport vehicles vs. data centers in terms of the amount of lock-in to particular vendors &cost of switching.

It looks to me like the cloud providers will soon have FedEx nicely tied over a barrel, and those 'savings' will prove illusory .

With trucks etc. there are still independent companies that can fix those and transitioning to a new provider is straightforward. With IT in cloud there is a strong vendor lock-in.

I think that's a false equivalence. That's more like FedEx buying their own server hardware.